There's merit in that. It seems like the WHO were indeed initially too worried about stepping on China's toes (including a pathetic display where rather than even mention the name 'Taiwan' in an interview with a Taiwanese reporter, one of their senior advisors simply terminated the call - after pretending not to hear her) - a stance exacerbated by China's own cagey initial response to the outbreak, which included denying entry to WHO teams in mid-Jan.

Not that it would have mattered that much insofar as Trump repeatedly ignored the WHO even after the latter got their act together. Whatever the case, Trump's attack on the WHO has nothing to do with merit - as if anything he does is - and everything to do with looking for a scapegoat in order to better shift blame from Mr. I'm-Not-Reponsible-For-Anything-At-All.

Well, now China can step in to the funding void Trump created. So cowing to them was quite forward thinking.

Also, Obama is a war criminal who, like the current administration, served the interests of the rich and powerful - his shameful bailouts being repeated today - and an otherwise small-visioned politician whose crowning achivement was not to rock the neoliberal boat.

On leaks, arguably illegal. — tim wood

The legality of the acts is not the issue. The issue is whether some people who supported him disliked these activities.

But you aver there were "a significant number of things" he did, — tim wood

He applied the espionage act numerous times against whistleblowers.

But you slide in weasel-like and with your rhetorical microscope find and without any accuracy at all proclaim the mote you find in his eye, overlooking the whole faggot in your own. — tim wood

I happen to know two completely unacquainted people who cited this as something they did not like about Obama, people who otherwise liked him.

To my way of thinking it all falls under the Big Lie. I'm calling you a Big Liar - not a good thing. Show me wrong. — tim wood

What's there to show? Either you believe me that he turned off otherwise friendly faces with these actions, or you don't. If you don't believe me, I really don't care.

How far back do we have to go to find a president who was not a war criminal? And why is that?

They are a vicious, ignorant, and sentimental folk. Just like us. — unenlightened

I dunno, I'm not super well versed in the American presidency. They probably all are, given that America has always been an imperial warmongering nation.

Where was Bin Laden killed again? — Benkei

And your problem with this is?

How far back do we have to go to find a president who was not a war criminal? — Banno

Hoover.

What's there to show? Either you believe me that he turned off otherwise friendly faces with these actions, or you don't. If you don't believe me, I really don't care. — Metaphysician Undercover

Per usual, you miss the mark. You said:

Actually there is a significant number of things which Obama did, that many Americans disagreed with, consequently tarnishing his image in their eyes. — Metaphysician Undercover

And this, your language, is what you're evading. Very troll-like, MU. I called you a liar, and you haven't moved me off of that.

Also, Obama is a war criminal who, like the current administration, served the interests of the rich and powerful - his shameful bailouts being repeated today - and an otherwise small-visioned politician whose crowning achivement was not to rock the neoliberal boat. — StreetlightX

Remarkably ignorant.

How a war criminal? How "served the interests of the rich and powerful"? Shameful bailouts? Am I missing something? Much of that money was repaid, or so I've read. And are you so young you've forgot the circumstances? That some of the recipients behaved very badly is yesterday's news. The effort of Democrats today is to try to prevent recurrences of abuses. But perhaps you're so far gone into your brand of racism with Obama bashing* that you did not notice that Trump dumped the fellow who was supposed to oversee distribution of relief funds. And if Obama served the rich, then why has Trump done whatever he can to reverse Obama policies wherever found, but especially to benefit the rich?

What's the point of all of this? All I see is a pathetic attempt to validate Trump by besmirching anything and everything else, just like Trump.

*I'll withdraw the racism if and when you make it clear your remarks are well and substantially founded, and, are balanced with respect to previous presidents. If, for example, you rate Obama a horror, then how Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II. Near as I can tell, the only reason for hating Obama is race. And maybe not being Lyndon Johnson.

Get [####] you piece of [####]

Accuse me of racism again on the basis of a post that has nothing to do with race and I will [##############]

Did you read the rest of my post? Or did you just blow a fuse? Can you offer a theory as to why Obama takes so much flack when he's probably the least deserving of general criticism than any US president since Eisenhower? Or at least on this:

Also, Obama is a war criminal who, like the current administration, served the interests of the rich and powerful - his shameful bailouts being repeated today - and an otherwise small-visioned politician whose crowning achivement was not to rock the neoliberal boat. — StreetlightX

can you put your money where your mouth is? You certainly offered no substantive response to any of the questions I asked you.

And why did you choose the invective you did? I also suggested it is ignorant - did you overlook that? Obama a war criminal? Really? A war criminal? a servant of the rich and powerful? That's not the history, and why then has Trump tried at every turn to unwind it? The bailouts shameful? You don't have to like or approve of them, but make your case. Two points: I am under the impression that a lot of the money was repaid, and I buy the idea that some intervention was necessary, and that not a "neoliberal" conceit. (And btw, don't you remember Bush's giving everyone $400?) Small-visioned politician? Are you from the US? Can you say Merritt Garland? Can you say Congressional Republicans? Or Mitch McConnell? Do you remember what he inherited from Bush, the mess that he made? And so forth. There's a history that folks either don't care about or don't know. And Obama taught Constitutional law for twelve years at the U. of Chicago. You should infer from that that Obama knows a thing or two about the US Constitution and the workings of the US government. And what everyone seems to completely overlook is that he is the first American President of manifest African descent, and he did not screw it up! In fact he did rather well.

I do not suppose you a racist. On the other hand you have the idea, along with a lot of people, that you can throw stones with impunity. I'm sorry you handle it so poorly when you're called on it. As to racism in the United States of America, I can assure that it's alive and well, perhaps not as overtly lethal as once it was; perhaps not quite so pervasive, but still vicious, dangerous, and harmful. You might want to pause for thought before you lend your arm to that team.

Agreed. The capacity of WHO is very limited. Individual governments shouldn’t rely only on one source when it comes to such a crisis - and many didn’t.

Nah [#####]. You don't get to accuse someone of racism on no basis and then pretend you want to have a level conversion. [######]

How far back do we have to go to find a president who was not a war criminal?
— Banno

Hoover. — Baden

Carter. I believe he claimed not to have fired a single shot during his administration. Had his rescue of the hostages in Iran been successful, then likely he couldn't have made that claim, but then he might also have gotten a second term.

Carter? Who at every turn did what he could to undermine the Sandinistas and pave the way for the Contras and their murderous regime? (Cemented by Reagan of course). Worth mentioning that Cater literally committed a war crime when flying Nicaraguan National Guard (who eventually become the Contras) out of the country under the banner of the Red Cross. The same Carter who effectively created the Mujahadeen which eventually became Al Qaeda and further along, ISIS? The same Carter who materially and financially assisted Sukarno as he slaughtered civilians in East Timor? Nah, Carter was a prick like the rest of them.

Lecture me about knowing my history. Wanker.

Ah, so you don't know how international law works.

And in case anyone had any doubt about the small-minded anemia of the Obama administration:

"To his most hopeful followers, Obama’s unique gift was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above. There was something to that view, but it never reckoned with the fact that Obama’s radicalism was, from the very beginning, bound up with a narrow notion of what politics was about. His was a vision less of power than of process, the culmination of twenty years of political theory journals where democracy was deliberation and deliberation was democracy. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan won election by promising to crush a systemic social malignancy: the slaveocracy, economic royalists, a parasitic class of liberal elites. Unlike these transformative presidents of left and right, Obama disavowed any structural transformations of society or the economy. Even when it came to race, as Obama’s most electrifying speech (on Jeremiah Wright) made clear, his vision of change was almost completely divorced from the social bases of power. His goal was to help both sides understand each other, to make our conversations better.

... As men and women watched their life savings go up in smoke and their homes disappear into foreclosure, Obama hailed the “power” of the market, declaring in his first inaugural address that capitalism’s capacity “to generate wealth and expand freedom” was “unmatched.” Encouraging free enterprise and rewarding individual initiative, he said in his 2013 State of the Union address, was the “unfinished task” of government. That was the positive vision. Just as often, he was reminding the left and reassuring the right of his belief in the limitations of government. Even as he affirmed his commitment to enforcing federal laws against discrimination, he was convinced “that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.” His famous phrase, “Hard things are hard,” which was made into a plaque he kept on his desk, was not a reference to the Affordable Care Act, as is commonly believed. According to top strategist David Axelrod, it was a reference to entitlement cuts, to Obama’s genuine desire to impose some kind of austerity on Social Security and Medicare in return for a deal with the Republicans on taxes and the debt. Thankfully, the Republicans refused it.

... Obama’s public philosophy: a moral minimalism that rendered him not so much ill-prepared for a fight with the Republicans as ideologically indisposed to the very idea of a fight. “Yes we can” was a sonorous but empty phrase: yes we can what? When Obama got concrete, he might stay in that register of grandness—there was that moment when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, and so on—but more often than not he opted for unapologetic avowals of smallness. “The true genius of America,” he told the DNC in 2004, is “an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm.” No one-off, that turn to the slight but simple truth of children being safe was a recurring theme of Obama’s presidency, arguably its epistemological ground. “There’s only one thing we can be sure of,” he said after Sandy Hook, “and that is the love that we have for our children. . . . The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true.” These were not just comforting words to a grief-stricken nation. They emanated from the idiom of bare life, the wariness of deep foundations that had come to characterize liberalism in the wake of the New Deal order and the end of the Cold War.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that such a smallness of vision could never withstand the largeness of the right. But, for Obama, opposing largeness with smallness was the point. In this age of Trump and Twitter, it’s easy to forget the exhaustion of the electorate after the foreign wars of Bush and the domestic wars of Rove. Obama was keenly attuned to it. Rather than depict the Republicans as revanchists, he chose to describe them as irresponsible and grandiose, reckless adventurers who fought extravagant wars they didn’t pay for and squandered a surplus they hadn’t earned. Theirs was a “politics of anything goes,” he said, a bacchanal of waste and war. They were dangerous and dumb and out of control; he was safe and smart and in control. After eight years of operatic conflict, the last thing Americans wanted was more. What they wanted was less. That’s what Obama promised them—action that was “imperfect,” victories that were “partial”—and no amount of Republican wilding would stop him from keeping that promise. Even if it meant the peace of a graveyard, the quiet of a tomb."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-obamanauts

Obama was a corporate tool and continued Bush's warmongering foreign policy. Street is right about Carter too. There is zero racial context to that. I mean you think we don't like Trump because he's orange?

I've said it before, but you are as misguided about Dems as Repubs are about Trump. The Dems and the Repubs are competing vendors in a political market where the product is political favors and the customers are monied interests. Obama previously won this competition for corporate money, hence his two election victories. Now the Repubs are back in the mix. The most egregious examples of this competition being the bailouts. Because Obama was cool and charming and had the Dem label plastered on his butt changes none of that.

What's the point of all of this? All I see is a pathetic attempt to validate Trump by besmirching anything and everything else, just like Trump. — tim wood

No. It's you utter inability to understand that people can be critical of BOTH Trump AND the Democrats.

If you see that being critical about Obama / Bush is validating Trump, it is simply absurd. It's the common stupidity in juxtapositioning everything. It's genuinely all that you see.

Besides, I think that a President that gives an order to kill an under aged American citizen just because his father (also an American citizen) was a spokesperson for Al Qaeda (after being tortured in an Egyptian prison) is something to be critical about. And as the President has made the decision himself after Bush (as the CIA and the Armed Forces obviously wanted a 'free from jail card' for the extrajudicial killings), it can be said it's his decision. But that doesn't validate Trump at all. He is a weak, inept and likely extremely corrupt leader.

The fact that people opposed Bush in his extrajudicial and secret operations during "The War on Terror" is understandable, but that the same people then fell silent when Obama continued many of the same practices just show how these people had nothing else but partisan politics in their mind.

But for sheer petty-minded vindictive nastiness, no one can beat the current administration.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-blocks-sale-ventilators-cuba-after-acquiring-medical-companies?fbclid=IwAR0F6xenKKXw1JMFR_9GLmiRtPQWmqrl9buOwzbnmQ4CGeQe1LYif3Cm5JY#.XpqlAEYopjo.facebook

@Benkei@Banno@StreetlightX@Metaphysician Undercover@ssu@baden

This, from StreetlightX, seems a reasonable magazine article, worth the read. It leaves me wondering what the author wants or expects.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-obamanauts

So a game. Anyone can play. Pretend you get to all-by-yourself elect the next American president. Candidates are anyone living or dead, from anywhere. Whom do you elect?

If Trump and Obama are symptoms of a rigged system then your question misses the point. Trump can only be the douche he is because of the Republican support in Congress.

It's not so much the President that's the problem. You could elect Karl Marx president and it wouldn't make a huge difference.

[Cross posted.]

A system that elects a Trump is indeed flawed. With respect to other presidents, he's just plain different, and not a good difference. So what's the solution? And have you no prospective candidates to offer? Anyone?

I've proposed elsewhere that Americans earn their vote by passing a one-time voting competency test. At the same time I like what I believe is the Australian law that all voters must go to the polls and cast a ballot. The general ignorance and especially political ignorance of the American voter is certainly a problem, the solution to which probably would solve a lot of other problems. But in itself, is it the problem? Or is it the form of government, the federal republic as so-called democracy? Or the particular form of the American government, with its three branches of government?

Get money out of politics and edit the Senate out of your constitution. You might have a chance then.

The fact that people opposed Bush in his extrajudicial and secret operations during "The War on Terror" is understandable, but that the same people then fell silent when Obama continued many of the same practices just show how these people had nothing else but partisan politics in their mind. — ssu

Yep. Both sides do that to the point that my eyes glaze over at any criticism, which might be bad if I weren't a nihilist.

Did you know that horror generated by evil kings is an expression of the divine child archetype? The evil king (Herod) is the shadow if the divine child (Jesus).

I credit you with meaning Senate when you wrote "Senate" and not Congress. And as well with knowing the differences between the US House and Senate, and their respective histories of how and why they came into being. Editing it out, then, seems unlikely. And there was an effort to get money out, but US Republicans jiggered it. I buy the idea that the American form of government is pretty good, at least in the sense that any major changes seem unlikely without major upheaval. That leaves education, and perhaps a carrot and stick approach to both voter qualification and voting itself. That is, mandatory universal suffrage: you qualify to vote or you pay, and you cast a ballot or you pay. I like it.

That Trump has poured sand into the machinery is not in itself evidence of the failure of the machinery itself, although perhaps of a need for some kind of filtration capacity. As to good and bad presidents, it's an article of faith with me that you start with the good man - or woman if and when. But I also accept that the good man as politician may as a matter of realpolitik have to act in some ways differently from the good man in other contexts.

Did you know that horror generated by evil kings is an expression of the divine child archetype? The evil king (Herod) is the shadow if the divine child (Jesus). — frank

Snipped for the scrapbook.

Do people think trump is going to win the re election?